President Ramaphosa's reminder of Sandile Dikeni's love poem was exactly what our country’s new union needed

Dear DM168 reader,

Thirty years after Nelson Mandela stood at the Union Buildings as the first president of a democratic South Africa, I found myself attending my first inauguration at the same venue, Sir Herbert Baker’s spectacular rendition of Africa’s Acropolis built and crafted from the sandstone and earth of surrounding koppies to signify the union of English and Afrikaans white South Africans.

As a member of the Press Council of South Africa, I was one of the invited guests to the inauguration of the first President of another type of union, a coalition government of national unity fashioned after Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, lost its majority for the first time in three decades.

Walking up the stairs to the Union Buildings I was struck by three things. First, on the distant hills was a stark reminder of how far we have come – the monolithic granite slab of the Voortrekker Monument, adjacent to the flags of Freedom Park.

Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park viewed from the Union Buildings. (Photo: Heather Robertson)

Then I was struck by the words engraved on the steps of the Union Buildings; the words of the 20,000 women of all races who marched to this building, protesting the grave injustice of the Pass Laws, in 1956.

Finally, I was struck again by what makes me feel there is no other home for me than here in Mzansi – the friendliness, the banter, the humour, our rich diversity of languages, cultures and accents, and the fact that despite our ups and downs and disasters in these last three decades, we do democracy. The presence of representatives from all the political parties who have been vying for our votes and going at each other’s throats, chatting and laughing in the cold stands, gave me hope.

There were loud cheers when President Cyril Ramaphosa took the podium and spoke from the heart, without reading from a script, acknowledging his and his party’s failures and his acceptance of the results of the election saying, voters “directed us to work together”.

Chief Justice Raymond Zondo administers the oath of office to president Cyril Ramaphosa at the Presidential Inauguration at the Union Buildings in Pretoria on 19 June 2024. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

There were more cheers when Ramaphosa said the people are fed up with corruption and State Capture and the endless bickering and blame games of politicians. Just as I heard Nelson Mandela say on the balcony of Cape Town city hall in front of thousands of us on the Grand Parade on his release from Victor Verster Prison in 1990, Ramaphosa offered himself as a “humble servant”.

He spoke to our lived experience of toxic cleavages, lines drawn between black and white, suburbs and townships, urban, rural, rich and poor, those who have jobs and those who do not. He spoke of our families wounded by poverty, crime, violence against women and children, and drug addiction.

He beckoned us all to choose to move forward, saying the formation of the GNU is the beginning of a new era – that the parties have agreed to work together and will “build a government that is capable and honest”.

President Cyril Ramaphosa and the first lady Dr Tshepo Motsepe arrive at the Presidential Inauguration at the Union Buildings in Pretoria on 19 June 2024. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

Then he surprised me and reminded me of my own distant past when he quoted a love poem for our country by my late colleague Sandile Dikeni with whom I worked at the Congress of South African Writers, Western Cape region, in the late 1980s.

When we were in our twenties, working from the congress’s offices in Athlone next to the Wembley Roadhouse, Sandile was a local hero, the people’s poet who would enthrall anti-apartheid political rallies attended by thousands with his militant poem, Guava Juice, that went “Shake, shake my comrade / shake that invention of the working class / shake that unifying medicine before it is too late / shake before the time come to pass / shake that guava juice”, a reference to the Molotov cocktails used in the youth resistance against apartheid.

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But Sandile was so much more than his militant rallying cry; he was complex, questioning, really funny and generous to the young aspirant writers and poets for whom we organised creative writing workshops and performances at the various People’s Creative Spaces in community venues around the Cape Flats.

Despite the climate of fear, the ’80s was a time of heightened creative expression through music, poetry, theatre and visual arts, an insistent voicing of the many strands of our common humanity that refused to be criminalised, categorised and silenced by the authoritarian racist security establishment.

In many ways we were freeing ourselves long before the return of the ANC exiles. And Cyril Ramaphosa, who was a leader and negotiator of the National Union of Mineworkers and of the United Democratic Front, was an integral part of our liberation.

Sandile moved on to become an editor at Die Suid Afrikaan, an arts editor and a columnist at the Cape Times, a radio journalist at SABC covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a government spokesman – never orthodox, never cowed to authority and even though he was detained as an ANC activist, he was uncompromising in his critique of the ANC once it was in power.

Writing about the Western Cape local government elections, he predicted that the ANC “is going to lose because [it] is a naive little organisation peppered with foolhardy Stalinists who cannot learn”, and he berated the ANC’s “arrogant kind of Africanism” for alienating coloured voters. His voice was stilled when he fell into a coma after a tragic car accident in 2005 from which he slowly recovered to launch his third volume of poetry Planting Water in 2007 but sadly he died of tuberculosis in 2019.

What a fitting choice of poet by our President who himself has to grapple with foolhardy Stalinists and the arrogant kind of Africanism that has torn his political party apart. Yet despite this, he chose to stay on the very difficult course of inclusivity and unity for South Africa, a course that poet Sandile Dikeni dreamed of throughout his life and  in Love Poem for My Country:

My country is for love
so say its valleys
where ancient rivers flow
the full circle of life
under the proud eye of birds
adorning the sky.

My country is for peace
so says the veld
where reptiles caress
its surface
with elegant motions
glittering in their pride

My country
is for joy
so talk the mountains
with baboons
hopping from boulder to boulder
in the majestic delight
of cliffs and peaks

My country
is for health and wealth
see the blue of the sea
and beneath
the jewels of fish
deep under the bowels of soil
hear
the golden voice
of a miner’s praise
for my country

My country
is for unity
feel the millions
see their passion
their hands are joined together
there is hope in their eyes
we shall celebrate

Ramaphosa has succeeded in outwitting his nemesis Jacob Zuma, who was hellbent on returning to power by hook or crook and by spewing divisive rhetoric. Instead, our newly inaugurated President has correctly read the mood of the majority of South Africans who do not seek or harbour revenge, but need our country to function for the benefit of all. Ramaphosa and the GNU cannot afford to waste an ounce of the generosity of this good will. Failure of the GNU to cooperate and govern constructively will feed the hyenas of hate.

The work must now begin for Ramaphosa, the ANC and their GNU partners to shake, shake the creative, critical, building, fixing and working juice to fulfil the dream of unity described in Sandile's love poem to our country.

On the front page of this week’s DM168 our cartoonist, Zapiro, references the Disney classic The Lion King, showing the GNU dawn being presented to the animal kingdom, a particularly apt satirical take as, despite the hope that the GNU brings, we still have the disgruntled Scar and his hyena friends plotting in the background.

We share stories and pictures about the inauguration and the hopes for the GNU, and Dianne Hawker, our legal correspondent, analyses the headway that our very own Scar, the disgruntled uncle from Nkandla, and his pack of MK hyenas are making in their attempt to get us back to vote in long queues all over again because he believes he was robbed.

Write to me at [email protected] to share your thoughts about the inauguration, what you want the GNU to prioritise and your hopes for our country, and I will consider them for publication on our letters page.

Yours in defence of truth and poetry,

Heather

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.